Knowledge retrieval and the world wide web

The Web is currently a distributed mass of simple hypertext documents, and the languages we currently use to associate metadata with Web resources are insufficient to satisfy all the requirements necessary to support precise, flexible and scalable knowledge representation and information retrieval. The authors explore the requirements for metadata languages to support knowledge representation and retrieval on the Web. They also present a new tool, WebKB, that interprets semantic statements stored in Web-accessible documents.